


awakening

by doctrpepper



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Be warned!, Blood and Gore, Character Death, Gen, Horror, Spirits, of many characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 00:25:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21262067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctrpepper/pseuds/doctrpepper
Summary: one by one all will eventually fallor, a series of strange circumstances begin to happen around azula





	awakening

**Author's Note:**

> "awakening" - a. pushkin
> 
> O dreams, O dreams,  
Where are your delights?  
Oh, where are you,  
The joys of night?  
The joyous dream  
Is vanished,  
And in a deep darkness  
I woke up  
Alone.
> 
> The deathly-still night  
Surrounds my bed.  
The dreams of love  
Grew cold in a moment,  
And flew away  
As a flock of birds.  
But my soul  
Is still full of desires,  
And catches  
The memories of a dream.
> 
> O love, O love,  
Listen to my prayers,  
Send me again  
Yours sweet visions,  
And in the morning  
Let me die  
In ecstasy  
With no awakening.

Azula remembers the morning of her brother’s Agni Kai very well. 

She had been informed of the occasion by a servant sent to collect her. She had chuckled darkly, imagining the nonsense her brother must have pulled to get challenged to an Agni Kai, of all things. She had never spared a thought to who he may have been fighting, or how he would fare, not before the fight began.

Azula finds she cannot remember the event itself very well at all.

She knows the story, of course. Her father towering over her brother, her brother cowering in fear, her uncle near tears, and herself, grinning. It all makes sense, she supposes. But she cannot remember it herself.

She remembers only fire. And then -

And then her brother is gone. 

No one in the palace even mentions him. It’s almost like he never existed, but traces of him remain, in the turtleduck pond, in the room no one enters or leaves anymore, in the empty chair at her father’s side no matter how many guests join the two of them for dinner. 

She finds it a little strange that no one even mentions him, not even the servants, who gossip to their hearts’ content in their rooms, unaware of her presence in the corridors in the walls she and her brother had discovered when they were small. They talk about inane and boring goings on of the masses, but not once do they mention she has, or ever had, a brother. It is almost as if he were a ghost even while he had been there.

As strange as she finds it, Azula has no intention of bringing it up herself. She likes it better this way. Her father divides his time between his duties to the Fire Nation and her training, no stumbling elder brother to shift his attention, and she rises to the challenge. She has always been a prodigy, but under her father’s expert eye, she reaches perfection. She becomes his perfect student, daughter, heir. 

After a while, she realizes she doesn’t think about her brother often. Only at night, jolting awake from a dream of fire, screaming, too hot, too much, does she spare him a thought. But then she remembers herself. There is no benefit in remembering her failure of a brother. She must think only of herself and pleasing her father. The dreams serve their own purpose, though. One night, sleep interrupted by a nightmare, she’s awake when a man steals into her room, knife in his hand and murder in his eyes. She’s able to hit him with a blast before he gets any sort of strike in, and the idiot had apparently worn flammable clothing to kill a firebender, because he burns to a crisp unnaturally fast. The fool. 

She stands over his body, watching her flames curl toward the sky and smelling the rancid scent of curdling flesh. She’s tired enough from sleepless nights that she thinks of her brother, then. The smell is the same, after all. 

She wonders if it had hurt.

Interestingly enough, she finds, when the guards arrive to take the body away, the assassin is the same as one who had come for her brother years ago, but had survived that encounter and escaped custody, fleeing into the night. They never mention her brother, of course, but she knows enough of the incident to put the pieces together.

She wonders if it truly is a coincidence. 

It is not long after she learns to generate lightning - and, soon after, perfects it - that she’s sent out on a mission to capture her uncle.

There had been an invasion in the north. Led by some idiot named Zhao, it had failed in only two days, the Water Tribe helped in no small part by her traitor of an uncle. There had been something about a moon spirit in the mission report, but she hadn’t spared that much of a thought. The mystical part of the world had never interested her much. 

Her father commands her to hunt down her uncle and capture him. She is nothing if not faithful.

Azula finds herself alone in the Earth Kingdom for the first time in her life. She is scouting ahead, taking the duty on herself after the last scout had failed to notice an entire regiment of Earth Kingdom soldiers in their path. She and her soldiers had been lucky that a freak rockfall had forced them out of their camp, which had allowed them to see the oncoming enemy combatants and prepare for a battle that would have otherwise been a slaughter. The failed scout is lucky he had been crushed by a falling rock, she muses, otherwise he would have suffered her wrath. The scout is no loss to her. He’d worked in the palace once, guarded her brother until he had suddenly been reassigned to her guard detail after the Agni Kai, and the only reason she recognizes him is because he had always laughed with her as her brother floundered. A charming connection, but she certainly won’t mourn him.

Picking her way through the undergrowth, she wonders at her uncle’s movements. They had struck her as erratic, the old man moving from small town to old village with seemingly nothing approaching a destination. But she knows her uncle, and knows the wily Dragon of the West is likely seeking something. All she has to do is find out what, and she can corner him, or better yet, hold what it is as bait and let him wander right into her trap.

She lets herself grin as she pushes aside a large piece of foliage. Showing emotion is a weakness she knows better than to succumb to, her brother is warning enough, but sometimes, like now, when she is alone, she cannot help herself. 

Azula glances behind her. Her regiment is long behind her, and now she cannot even see them through the trees. She glances at the sky, shocked to discover the sun dipping close to the horizon. She’d been walking longer than she’d thought, an unusual lapse in perception. 

No matter, she’d simply find a spot to rest the night. Her soldiers know better than to continue without her, and they would simply assume this delay was intentional. 

Azula finds a crook in a tree, high enough from the ground and wide enough to hold her weight, and climbs up to it. She’s not used to sleeping in the wilderness, away from all the comforts she had ever known, with nothing but a small sack of food and a water pouch to sustain her, but she’s not about to complain. She knows her duty. 

She drifts into an uneasy sleep. First she can’t find a comfortable position, then she feels nonexistent insects crawling over her that are nothing more than her imagination, and then she hears the noises of the forest around her, each new sound pulling her from her rest, uncertain where it comes from and what it is. 

The forest is dark and full of enemies. For the first time it strikes her that, for once in her life, she is well and truly alone. 

Not long after she finally drifts off, she jolts awake. Another bad dream. The moon is still high in the sky and Azula sighs, gathering her meager supplies. It seems she won’t be sleeping tonight. She may as well continue scouting. The night may be a better time for it, after all, as any nearby enemies would probably have started a fire, which would give away their location much easier than if she had to stumble upon them. 

She walks further into the dark woods, trying to focus both on making out the path ahead of her and keep an eye out for any pinpricks of light that may lead to an enemy encampment.

She doesn’t bother to light a flame herself. She can’t see great, but she can see her path well enough, and she has no intention of giving up her own position. 

From out of nowhere, a bird flies past her face, its dark body blending in against the inky blackness of the night. She jerks back, hands flying up to protect her face. The bird makes a sound and flaps its wings wildly against her hands, claws tearing into her palms. She cries out and takes a stumbling step back. The bird cries out as well, and she swipes at it with bloodied fists. 

It lets out a strangled sort of noise and then its neck seems to snap, all on its own accord. Its limp body falls to the ground.

She stands, breathing heavily and trying to process what had just happened.

Azula takes a deep breath. That had been weakness. Unacceptable. She has to do better.

Suddenly, she spots it. A small movement, invisible if one isn’t looking directly at it. Dark clothing hides the form, but she’d recognize an earthbending position anywhere. Fire blazes in her palms as she whips her head around, searching for the culprit, but before she can make any movement there is a sharp crack of bone and a short scream that’s cut off by another crack, and the sound of someone hurrying away through the woods. She makes her way to where she had heard the sound to see a Fire Nation soldier, crushed nearly flat by rocks. His legs and arms are bent at odd angles and face is frozen in its final look of pure horror, eyes wide and blank, blood trickling in a slow drip from his mouth. She recognizes him as the commander sent to lead a regiment of new recruits to their deaths in a diversionary tactic, who had come up with the original idea before it had been stolen by power-hungry generals and then who had run at the last second to save his own skin. 

Only to die here, at the hands of an earthbender, anyway, Azula muses. 

Suddenly the man jerks, not as dead as she had thought, his eyes unfocused and cloudy. A fractured arm shoots out, cracked and bleeding fingers wrapping around her wrist in a vice-like grip before she can back away. She glowers down at the man for daring to touch her, sneering and building her fire to end him once and for all, but before she can, he speaks.

“He is coming for you last,” his torn throat forces out, blood flowing more freely down his trembling lips. Some of it splatters on her exposed arm and she tries to pull herself away, but his grip is strong for a man so close to death. “He wanted to save you, but he’s too far gone. You will die like the rest.”

She gives up on freeing herself and sets the man ablaze. He warbles out a feeble cry and his grip loosens enough for her to jerk away and back up, watching him flail in his last death throes before finally succumbing to oblivion. She wipes at the blood on her wrist, mulling over his mysterious words for a minute before deciding the ravings of a dying man has no meaning. Still, something about what he had said sticks in her mind, and even when she’s back with her soldiers and continuing her mission she thinks back to the encounter. 

Her army locates the nearby camp of the Earth Kingdom squadron that had ambushed the dead soldier and make short work of them. The squadron had never particularly fought before, as they had specialized in sneak attacks and claimed to be averse to killing. The unusually large amount of prisoners in their camp had attested to this vow, as did their captured Earth Kingdom soldiers and the Fire Nation spies. It was an oath, they had said, made to some spirit of life or another, that this particular division had been devoted to. No matter, they are well and truly out of service, one way or another, thanks to Azula’s soldiers.

Azula finds her uncle in a desolate town, and the Avatar and his companions with him. Further proof of his treachery. She manages to fight the Avatar and his assortment off, and hits her uncle with a bolt of lightning. The Avatar seems to hit a second wind then, and she is forced to fight him off as the waterbender rushes to her uncle’s side. The girl pulls water out of her pouch, and it begins to glow as she rests her hands on the body. Azula focuses her attention on her battle, but both her and the Avatar are distracted as the waterbender lets out a scream. Azula turns to look, and find a shard of ice growing steadily through her uncle’s skin into the air, coming directly out of his heart. His body twitches, then lies still. The waterbender buries her head in her hands and begins to sob.

“Katara?” the Avatar asks, concerned.

“I didn’t - I was  _ healing _ him - I -” The waterbender’s voice trembles. The Avatar rushes to her side, battle forgotten, and their other two companions peel themselves off the ground to join into the hug. 

Azula frowns at her uncle’s still body. She had never really cared much for him, finding him too careless and goofy, regardless of his military achievements, and after his failure at Ba Sing Se he did not even have that. Her brother had been the one to idolize him, and then, when he had disappeared after the loss of his son, on some sort of soul-searching journey or some such nonsense, her brother had felt as if her uncle had left him behind, abandoned him to her and her father. Even after her uncle had returned, her brother had never quite been the same with him. They had seemed to be doing better, but then there had been the Agni Kai, and -

If she remembers correctly, her uncle had seemed to think it was something he had done that had led to it. For all she knows, it had been.

Azula knows when to back away rather than fight, and she knows that the Avatar, after comforting his companion, will likely return to their battle with righteous vigor, his companions likely catching their own second winds. She had been sent to collect her uncle, not the Avatar, and nothing is keeping her here, fighting a losing battle against a powerful entity. She turns and leaves.

She returns to her entourage and reports that her uncle has died, killed by the Avatar’s waterbender. Despite the girl’s sobs, it is clear what had happened. Perhaps it had been unintentional, perhaps not, but it had happened.

In her tent that night, Azula thinks. Three men have died in front of her - four, counting the assassin back in the palace - and while all their deaths could be written off as coincidence, something strikes her as odd. Clothes catching fire more easily than they should, a boulder falling directly on a man that had every opportunity to run, an earthbending move aimed to kill by a soldier who had vowed never to kill, a shard of ice in the heart of a man who had been healing. Perhaps even the bird, its neck snapped mid-flight, is involved. Something is happening, Azula is sure of it, she just has no idea of what it could be.

Her mission ended, though not as she had wanted, Azula returns to the palace. Her father is just as displeased as she is, but recognizes there is nothing to be done. The war begins to pick up as the Avatar traverses the Earth Kingdom, rallying formerly disenchanted soldiers in his wake. Her father sequesters himself in the war room, arguing and strategizing day and night with his generals, and Azula spends her time training, perfecting technique after technique in the event she will be sent into the field again. She will not be weak, not like last time. Time passes, a tense atmosphere descending on the palace so thickly even the servants sense it.

One day a general, one she only recognizes for how fervently he had supported that plan to send new recruits to the front lines, disappears. His body is discovered in his quarters, a wooden stake through his heart. Medics examining the scene reason that he had tripped in the night and broken off a section of his bed, which had impaled him. An unusual death, to be sure, but nothing suggests foul play. Azula stays long enough to listen to the explanation, then retreats to her own quarters. Another death to add to the list of coincidences, it seems. Unbidden, the words of the man in the forest return. Who is “he”? Who is coming? And what had he meant by “too far gone”?

She finds her thoughts circling too much, so she leaves her room and begins to pace the halls, thinking. Something is happening, something bad, something that results in death. If only she can figure out what. 

The sound of something crashing to the ground startles her out of her musings, and she looks up. She’s wandered to the quarters of another general, this time the one she remembers as having proposed the plan to sacrifice soldiers to her father. Before she can ponder on the connections she’s beginning to form, another crash sounds from inside. Before she can stop herself, she’s bursting through the door.

The general is on the floor, a gash on his head bleeding out and leaking blood into an already sizeable puddle on the carpet. A golden statue of a dragon, a gift Azula remembers her father had granted the general after their successful plan, lies cracked on the ground next to his body, the blood caked on its side evidence it had been the cause of the man’s injury. It seems as if it had simply fallen, but this is one too many coincidences.

Azula’s attention is torn away from the grisly scene by movement out of the corner of her eye. She whips her head around, but there’s nothing there. Even so, she feels the heavy weight of eyes on here, feels the heat of some unknown anger and malice. The presence seems to swell for a moment, overwhelming her senses, making the hairs on her arms stand on end, filling the room with a sudden coldness, but as soon as it had come, it disappears. The candles flickering on the walls go out, sending the room into total darkness. Not even the moon shines through the window. 

Azula takes a breath to center herself. It’s shaky. 

She is just about to turn and leave when a hand grabs her ankle in a vice-like grip. She almost makes a sound, but her control is just good enough to stay her tongue. 

“Every kill he grows stronger, every kill he grows more lost,” the general gasps out. She freezes, remembering a similarly cryptic message from a dying man in a wood so far away. She hears the man’s breath shudder, hears a gurgle in his throat, and then silence. The hand around her ankle slackens and she bolts from the room, barely able to keep herself at nothing more than a brisk walking pace. 

When she’s back in her room she collapses into her bed and lets out a shuddering breath. She feels a coldness coil in her gut, a feeling she hadn’t felt in so long she had almost forgotten about it. Fear.

She still doesn’t know what is happening, or who this mysterious “he” is, but she knows something is happening and that she is involved. This is no series of coincidences, this is something far beyond that. Her arms clutch at her shoulders and she bends at the waist, breath coming in quick bursts. She is to be last, the first man had said. How many are left before her? 

She doesn’t want to die. 

She had thought she had come to terms with death. She knows what she risks, being in the field. She knows what she risks, being the crown princess of the Fire Nation with enemies breathing down their necks both outside their borders and within. She knows what she risks, being her father’s child and now his sole heir. She knows what she risks, but that doesn’t mean she has any desire to die. And this - this is different. This is not dying in battle, or to assassins, or to her own failings. This is something bigger than she knows, than she understands, something deep and dark and evil, something that has her in its sights with nothing she can do about it. 

It must be a spirit, she realizes. It has to be, nothing else makes sense.

Azula takes a deep breath, returns to her perfect posture, and forces a smile onto her face. It doesn’t fit quite as right as it should, but it’s the best she can do, under the circumstances. There is some sort of spirit haunting her and killing those around her. This is unusual, but not unheard of. Incidents involving spirits, good and evil, have been recorded for as long as history can remember, and surely someone has come up with a way to ward them off. Forming a flame to light the way, she makes her way to the library. She may be walking faster than normal, and her usual mask of indifference may be cracking, but everyone is too busy scrambling in the wake of a dead body - and by now, she supposes, a second - to even notice her. Normally she would be furious the servants won’t even spare her a passing glance, let alone bow at her passing as they should, but now she feels almost relieved to be out of sight. 

She reaches the library and immediately heads to the section on spirit lore. She and her brother had perused these shelves often growing up, sent on one homework assignment or another, but she had never visited this section much. It had been her brother who had been fascinated by the spirit tales, while she had focused her attention on the lives of the Fire Lords, real, tangible facts and history she could believe.

She spares no time to lament her lack of interest, launching immediately into the first book she sees that looks promising. It’s an account of the Painted Lady, spirit who had haunted the coastline for generations. Azula had heard of her before, a long ago memory of her mother telling her this story coming to her mind. The tale in the book is far darker than the one her mother had told, however. Here, the Painted Lady is said to have drowned fishermen in her waters and brought forth a plague that left half the towns wounds that would not heal and minds that dissolved into insanity before they, too, drowned beneath the waves. Her mother had told her and her brother that the Painted Lady was appeased when the townsfolk pleaded with her to spare them, and she had been moved by their sincerity. Of course, her mother had also told her that all the Painted Lady had done was bring unpredictable tides. According to the book, she reads, the Painted Lady had continued in her rampage until the townspeople were all dead, and the lands she haunted had been left bare until new folk came, fleeing the clan wars, and had begun to worship the Painted Lady as a goddess, fearful of a similar end as their forefathers. 

Azula hears a muffled sound and jerks into a ready stance, alert. She stands, frozen, waiting for another sound, a feeling, a cold blast, anything. She stands until her muscles begin to cramp in their tense position. There is nothing, so she cautiously relaxes. Her hands are shaking. She’s not sure if it’s because she held them tense for too long or because of fear. 

She looks for another book. Waiting for the spirit to off her and letting whoever comes after her deal with the problem is not her solution. She will survive this, whatever it is, whatever it takes. 

As she searches, the sun gradually begins to rise. No one comes searching for her, not even the librarian, who she thinks hasn’t even arrived at all. No doubt the entire palace is in uproar after two generals died the same night. She would have felt annoyed no one bothers to find her amidst the chaos, to check on her safety or inform her of the events or any reason, really, but she can only feel the coil of fear in her gut. She can’t worry about the rest of the world right now, she needs to focus on trying to save herself. The deaths have been so irregular, she has no idea when the spirit will strike next, or to who. She has to make sure it’s not her.

After what feels like ages of searching, Azula stumbles upon an old, dusty tome. It contains a myriad of tales about those who had first settled in the Fire Islands, but one story strikes her eye. The only spirit tale in the book is a passage that tells of a Blue Spirit. Azula frowns. The Blue Spirit, she had thought, is an Earth Kingdom myth, a trickster god who causes just enough trouble to tame the egos of the powerful, but never to the point of being malicious or evil.

The spirit in this tale, on the other hand, is a not one being but a type of spirit. According to the story, a blue spirit manifests from the soul of an innocent murdered and becomes a force of vengeance. At first the soul has some remains of their humanity, but as each act of vengeance is carried out, more and more of the soul is consumed as the spirit becomes stronger. The only way its mad path of anger is stopped is if it gets its revenge against all who had wronged it, or if the human soul can overpower the spirit that has overtaken them, an act that can only happen if someone the soul had loved in life calls them back from the brink.

Azula sits back and ponders. The description of a blue spirit seems like it could match whatever she’s facing, but to stop it she has to first figure out who it is, then somehow appeal to its humanity.

She had been so proud of how well she can ignore feelings, prioritizing only power and skill and regarding any emotions, from her or from others, as weak and irrelevant. Faced with the knowledge she now has, she almost regrets that mindset. To save her life, she, master of shutting down emotional connections, will have to form an emotional connection with a spirit lost to the throes of vengeance. 

It is a tragic irony. She can recognize that much, at least.

Azula rubs her temples. First things first, she’ll have to uncover the spirit’s identity. Perhaps that will grant her a clue as to how to bring out the human soul.

There has to be some connection between everyone who had died. She makes a list in her head. The assassin, her soldier, the army man, her uncle, the two generals. 

Of course, she realizes, her breath catching. All had wronged her brother in some way or another.

She had known the connection all along but had never but it together. It’s almost too much to think about. Her brother, who she had mocked and beaten and fought her whole life. He won’t win this time, she tells herself, but she can’t lie to herself, not like she could to him.

To save her own life, she has to pull him back from the brink of madness.

Somehow, she thinks, if their positions had been reversed, it might even work. 

Azula stands shakily and makes her way slowly out of the library, not even noticing she’s still clutching the book to her chest. The hallways are entirely empty this time, no one around to notice her stumbling walk. 

She finds herself outside a set of doors. They’re locked, as always. No one has come here in years.

Her brother’s rooms. 

She pushes open the doors.

They swing wide with a loud creak and a cloud of dust. She coughs, pushing her way through. Inside, she has to light a flame, as all the windows are covered with dark cloth. Everything is untouched, as far as she can tell. Her brother’s books are arranged haphazardly on his shelf, his little trinkets he’d been so insistent on picking up from the markets scattered seemingly random around the flat surfaces. His bedsheets are unmade, from when he had jumped out of bed the morning of his Agni Kai. 

Azula lets her eyes drift over this preserved moment in her brother’s life - one of the last - and allows herself, for the first time, to remember him. 

Her brother had been her main competition for so much of her life. He had been the one to measure herself against, to prove herself against, to beat until her father would finally look at her with pride. She had thought of him as an enemy for so long, someone to win against, someone beneath her, she almost cannot imagine him as anyone different.

But.

There had been a time, once, long ago, when she had looked up to him. Long before her fire, long before their father had treated them differently, long before their mother had done the same. He had been there for her when she needed him most. He had held her hand in the darkness and had wiped away her tears and had hugged her close.

As much as her mother had claimed she’d loved her, she had never been there when she needed her. As much as her father claimed he loved her, he had never been there when she needed him.

Her brother always had. He had up until she had pushed him away, telling herself she didn’t need him anymore.

Yet another lie she had told. One of many.

She remembers him seating her beside him at the turtleduck pond, pointing out every turtleduck and telling her their names. She remembers his large hand guiding hers gently over one’s back, remembers his soft smile as he had watched her. She remembers the gentleness that had been in his eyes, the softness that had never gone away, no matter what he had suffered. 

She remembers him being the only one to tell her he loved her and mean it.

She falls to her knees, book clattering to the floor, hands flying over her mouth to hold back her sobs. She feels tears build behind, but they don’t fall. She cannot even cry for him. 

She’s not sure how long she sits there, hunched over on her knees, shoulders shaking in silent, dry sobs, but she’s startled out of it by the sound of a gong. Danger.

She stands, knees creaking, and levels one last glance at the room around her. She will stop her brother. It’s the best she can do for him, after everything. He deserves a peaceful afterlife, not trapped in a vengeful cycle. Were he aware of what he was doing, he would be horrified.

She rolls her shoulders back and fixes her posture, forcing her face into a mask of indifference. She has a job to do, a role to play.

She leaves the rooms. She does not close the doors behind her. 

Azula, as is custom when the gong sounds, heads to the throne room. She, like the elite soldiers of the palace, are to protect the Fire Lord no matter what.

When she arrives, the room is in shambles. Charred chucks are taken out of the pillars, and the wall of flame before the throne is flaring wildly, uncontrollably. The war table in the center is aflame, the maps burning steadily into ash.

Her foot hits something and she glances down.

It’s a guard, one of the guards tasked with protecting her father. His face is completely burned away, a singed mess of blistered and blackened skin and bone. And then the smell hits, just as disgusting as before.

The smell is almost overpowering, but she holds her nose and moves forward. She looks around, blinking through the smoke for a glimpse of her father, but is forced to duck out of the way as another man flies past her. He hits the pillar just behind her with a sickening squelch. She smells another whiff of burnt skin. She doesn’t look back. 

She finds her father behind the throne, cowering. He’s on his knees, crying, begging for mercy, staring up at -

At nothing. 

He staggers backwards suddenly, eyes locked onto empty air. His body hunches, his mouth moves, no sound coming out, just fear. It’s a familiar position. 

Azula realizes what is happening and jumps forward, hand outstretched, but she’s too late.

A plume of flame appears from out of thin air and envelops her father. He screams, course, throat choked with unshed tears.

She remembers a scream just like this, three years ago.

Her father falls to the ground, face down, twitching. Then he lies still. 

She rushes forward without thinking. She falls to her knees beside him. For all he had put her through, for all he had put her brother through, this is her father. This is the man who had trained her, who had made her powerful, who had been proud of her. 

Suddenly, the body moves. The head turns toward her and she lets out a strangled gasp. The flesh is completely burned, blackened away in some parts and almost melting off the bones in others. All identifying features have been burned away, leaving a chasm of charred flesh in its place. The mouth opens with a scrape of bone, cutting a broken slash through the melted skin of the lips.

“You’re next,” comes a rattling voice, thick with death, and then the body lies still once again. 

Azula crouches over her father’s body, hands shaking.

A sound startles her. She spins around, and for the first time, she sees him. The creature that had been haunting her. The blue spirit. Her brother. 

He looks much like he had in life. He looks exactly as he had the last time she had seen him, three years ago. The only difference is half of his face is completely burned away, charred skin down to the bones. His ear is gone, burned down to a mangled stump, and his eye is gone as well, the edges of its empty socket slick with its remains. 

He takes a breath, and it rattles in his throat.

She hadn’t thought he’d be breathing.

His one remaining eye narrows and his mouth twists into a sick grin she had seen so many times on her own face. It looks so, so wrong on his. 

“Wait,” she says. She isn’t sure how to start, what to do. She’s shaking, lost. She’s the same scared little girl that had hidden under her brother’s covers and buried her face in his chest, crying and begging him to keep her safe. “Please.”

He tilts his head.

Azula stands shakily, legs wobbling underneath her. She takes a halting step toward him. He doesn’t move. She takes another step, extending her arms in front of her. Tears prickle behind her eyes, and she feels wetness on her cheeks as they come trailing down. Now she can cry for him like he deserves, finally she can give him the mourning he had been so cruelly denied. 

He doesn’t move as she reaches him, standing face to face with him. She realizes, then, all of a sudden, that she’s older now. She had reached an age he had never gotten to see. 

She looks in his eyes and sees darkness, malice, but underneath it all, pain. 

She throws her arms around his shoulders and pulls him close. She tucks his head into the crook of her neck and reaches a hand up to card through his tangled hair. He’s solid, just like always, but so, so cold. She strokes his head and holds him close.

Just like he used to do for her.

He doesn’t move.

She takes a deep, shuddering breath, then begins to talk. She isn’t sure of what she’s saying. She tries to tell the story of the Painted Lady, the one their mother had told them, the nice one, but she’s sure she’s butchering it. She keeps stuttering, restarting, repeating herself.

She isn’t sure how long she stands there, holding him close, telling her tale. 

All of a sudden, for the first time, he moves. She freezes, cutting off her sentence, but then he wraps his arms around her waist and hugs her back, just as tightly. She lets out a sigh of relief, tears leaking out of her eyes. She had been so worried she wasn’t getting through to him, but she’s glad she has. 

She’s surprised to realize that this has become more than about self preservation. She doesn’t want to die, but she also wants to do what she can to save her brother. She wants to help him. 

She continues her tale, her brother holding her tight. She feels him shudder in her arms and nestle closer to her chest. She feels wetness on the front of her shirt. 

When she finishes the story, with the happy ending their mother had invented for them, she risks pulling away.

Her brother lets her, stumbling backward. He looks up at her and blinks at her with wide, tearful eyes. 

Two of them. The burn that had so horrifically marred his face is gone, and he looks just as he had the last time she had seen him whole and alive. 

“I wanted to protect you,” he says, voice thick with tears and wobbly with emotion, just as she remembers. “I tried to - but there was so much darkness, so much anger, so much hate -”

“I know,” she responds softly, smiling gently.

“I’m sorry, Azula,” he says, glancing down in shame. His form begins to fade, white light gathering at the edges. “I’m sorry for leaving you.” He glances up again, suddenly fearful. “Will everything be okay now? That I’m gone? Will you be okay?”

“Silly Zuzu,” she chides, her throat closing up and tears springing back into her eyes. “I’ll be fine.”

It’s far from the first time she’s lied to her brother. She knows, though, despite the ache in her chest at the thought, that it’s the last. 

He dissolves into white light. The flames flickering around the room go out. She’s left in darkness, death strewn around her.

She feels numb, her tears all gone and her heart empty. She had worked so hard to bring herself to this state, with no emotion, no feelings, but now that she is here, she wants nothing more than to break down in tears and wait for this horror to pass. 

She leaves the throne room, abandoning the mess behind her, and returns to her rooms. She lays in her bed and falls quickly asleep, and for the first time in years it’s not interrupted by dreams. 

In the morning she awakens with the sun and leaves her quarters. The palace is alight with panic as the body of her father is discovered and dealt with, along with the others who had died. 

She drifts through the chaos as if on a cloud. People notice her, call out to her in panicked voices, coming toward her to get her attention, but she ignores them all. 

She finds herself in front of her brother’s rooms again. In all the madness, no one has closed the doors, so they’re still open from the night before. Calmly, slowly, she reaches out and lets out a stream of flame, watching with unblinking eyes as it catches on the bedsheets and curtains and blazes wildly.

She watches until the contents of the room, the books, the trinkets, the candles, the clothes, all burn to unrecognizable black. Then she turns and heads toward the throne room. 

The Fire Nation needs a Fire Lord, and she is the only option left to them.

Her brother’s memory burns to ashes behind her. 

**Author's Note:**

> happy halloween! i wrote this after watching steven king movies on neflix, you can see how the vibe changes. yeehaw
> 
> [writing blog](https://pishuu.tumblr.com/) [main](https://doctrpepper.tumblr.com/) and [atla specific blog](https://kiyosji.tumblr.com/)


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